1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a mobile device and particularly to a solution wherein GPS based services are facilitated.
2. Related Art
Mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous. Children carry them and so do adults. Children use them to ask their parents to come pick them up at a mall or a park. Often parents spend a lot of time trying to locate their child at a mall when they get a call for a ride. Similarly, children wait for a long time outside a mall waiting for their parents to arrive, often in inclement weather. This problem is also faced by mobile users who travel to a new country on business and pleasure and wait for a taxi pickup at an airport, outside an airport or in train stations.
Quite often, a user has a mobile phone with a GPS and may desire to go to a store. The user has to type in an address to activate the GPS based navigational facilities. The address could be long and comprise of more than 50 characters quite often, making the user struggle with the painfully small and cramped keyboard on the mobile device. Quite often the keyboards on a mobile device has 3 letters of the alphabet mapped into a single key that makes data entry very complicated and tiring.
Often a user has a mobile phone and drives around town. Unfortunately, the various places the user visits is not known to the user's family or his colleagues at work. If the user's wife had wanted him to buy some stamps when the user was at the post office, she does not have any way to find out if the user visited or went by a post office while driving around town. And the user has no way to automatically determine if his wife needs him to buy something either.
Quite often a manager is a business assigns tasks to his subordinates to get some work done. However, task assignment, such as assigning homes for a sales person to visit on a given day, is usually a priori. If a new task comes up that must be assigned right away, there is no easy way to determine which of the subordinates is the right person to whom the task should be assigned. Such determination may take several phone calls and timely responses from the recipients of those phone calls.
The vCard standard for exchanging electronic business cards has been around for some time and is used for sending email attachments of business cards. They can contain name, address, phone numbers, logos, URLs and photos. However, they do not really help a user in easily navigating from his house to a business (such as a store). There are some deficiencies in the contents of most vCards. Other variations to vCards exists, such as hCard that provide similar features.
GPS satellites have been used for a while for navigation. GPS satellites do not actually pinpoint your location as is commonly believed. The 24 satellites circling the earth each contain a precise clock that transmits a signal comprising a time to the GPS receiver in a user's mobile device. The mobile device processes the satellite signals to determine geometrically where the user is located.
Quite often, GPS based components are used in cell phones, and in some vehicles. However, there are very few applications that are available that make use of these devices for anything other than simple navigation from point A to point B. Some location based services have been created that provide a user with sales coupons based on the location determined for a user. But there are few meaningful applications that exist that try to make a user's work efficient. There are no applications/solutions that try to optimize task assignment, and try to make further use of GPS technologies to dynamically assign work, opportunistically reschedule work, etc.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art through comparison of such systems with the present invention.